PW Profiles Marcia Muller

Everything I wrote from age 12 on had a criminal element to it,” says Marcia Muller, 64, during a midday interview in her living room in a suburb north of San Francisco. “When I was in my late 20s, I started reading writers like Ross Macdonald, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and I was hooked.” Muller was hooked, not just as a reader, but as a writer, on the theme of criminality and on the idea of the private investigator, someone outside the official world “who goes off into the night and fixes thing.”

Muller's fictional alter ego, Sharon McCone, has been “going off into the night” to solve cases since 1977, when she first appeared as a private investigator in the novel Edwin of the Iron Shoes (David McKay). Today, 26 novels later, McCone's running her own detective agency in San Francisco and has become one of crime fiction's most enduring characters, winning Muller recognition from critics and peers (she was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 2005) and, of course, new readers.

Muller's latest, Locked In (Grand Central, Oct.), has a horrifying conceit: McCone is shot in her office by a late-night intruder and wakes up in the hospital to discover she is “locked in,” entirely paralyzed. She can only communicate by blinking in response to questions. She is literally forced to rely on her extensive network of friends and colleagues—including her beloved husband and business partner, Hy Rapinsky—to find out who shot her and why.

Muller says this new approach to a McCone novel, incorporating the perspectives and backstories of the many people surrounding her popular heroine, is a very conscious attempt to shake things up. “I thought the series needed a new direction,” she says. “I think it's going to make the series more interesting, and it's going to keep me more interested.” (Yes, McCone is still in action, and Muller is already well into the writing of her next installment, Coming Back.)

But Locked In also underscores something important about McCone and her place in the universe of fictional PIs: she isn't a hard-boiled loner, the existential hero existing on the margin of society, even if she does spring from the likes of Hammett's Sam Spade, Chandler's Philip Marlowe or Macdonald's Lew Archer. It's often said that Muller “invented” the idea of a hard-boiled female private eye, but the author insists, rightly, “I don't consider myself a noir writer or even particularly hard-boiled.” And even a perfunctory understanding of McCone demonstrates the truth of that assertion. She's surrounded by friends and colleagues, is happily married, doesn't drink to excess, isn't particularly cynical and is thoroughly engaged with her life. McCone could be the woman next door, and this is part of her appeal.

“A lot of readers have told me, 'I could have been McCone,' ” says Muller, “if they hadn't been trapped by certain circumstances, if they hadn't been so afraid to go out and do things; it is likely true.” McCone is a doer, eager to get out there and find the truth, and Muller is happy to let her do just that. “I practically live with that woman on my shoulder, telling me what to do,” she says.

Muller has written three stand-alone novels and collaborated with her husband, crime writer Bill Pronzini, on others, but she has no intention of giving up on McCone. “The important thing to me is to keep those ideas coming,” she says. The title of the next book, Coming Back, suggests that there's plenty of life left in the private investigator. “It's about McCone coming back from her illness,” says Muller, “but it's also about people coming back from Iraq. It's a real political novel.” Muller has tackled some big themes in her books, like corporate greed and urban poverty, and says her work “has become darker and more serious” over the years.

But Muller's novels are still crime stories. “I'm more interested in the 'why' than the 'what,' ” she says. “And readers like the fact that at the end, even though someone is dead or damaged, you have the answers, that things are wrapped up.” Readers will also like that she has no immediate plans to “wrap up” Sharon McCone.